Let's Get Down to Business
by AlexJanna
Summary: It was a monumental task, protecting the protectors, but Bucky had done so much bad. If he could make up for decades of pain and destruction by using his magic to help Steve's team, he was damn well going to do it. Series:Witch Bucky
1. Fairest One of All

**Title** : Chapter 1: Fairest One of All

 **Pairing** : Bucky Barnes, Rebecca Barnes Proctor

 **Series** : Witch Bucky

 **Rating** : PG

 **Genre** : Canon Divergent Post CAWS

 **Warning** : Magic, Witch Bucky, BAMF Bucky, Bucky Remembers, Siblings/Family

 **Summary** : It was a monumental task, protecting the protectors, but Bucky had done so much bad. If he could make up for decades of pain and destruction by using his magic to help Steve's team, he was damn well going to do it.

* * *

Bucky's been in Brooklyn for two months before he decides the world has calmed down enough from the Fall of SHIELD for him to move more freely.

He'd been visiting his sister twice a week and putting off meeting his nieces and nephews long enough that he figured Rebecca would strong arm him into a family reunion if he couldn't come up with a good excuse to avoid it.

Stalking the Avengers seemed like a good enough excuse. Well, some would say stalking, Bucky would say strategic surveillance. And by that he meant stalking.

In truth, he had long since planned out his next moves and it was past time he made them. The first was protecting his allies and to do that Bucky had to know exactly what he was protecting them from. For that he used a combination of old fashioned spy techniques, technological infiltration, and a number of different spells designed to reveal the past, future, and present in that order, strangely enough.

Using his baseline laptop and the high-speed wifi from the coffee shop across the street, Bucky spent a business week of hacking a staggering number of secret originations, governments, and departments. Most of what he learned was unsurprising, but a few things were worth keeping track of.

Natasha Romanov _his student, his apprentice, his little spider_ \- was predictably still on every Russian secret organization's kill-with-extreme-prejudice list. She'd been on it since defecting in the late 2000s. Bucky figured she'd been doing a good job of surviving on her own so far, he didn't need to immediately deal with the issue.

Now the U.S. government was sniffing around her for her part in exposing Hydra and all its secrets, but that was something that could be handled with judicious application of lawyers and ten thousand (and more) dollar handshakes. He was staying as far away from that mess as he possibly could.

Digging into the Black Widow's threat assessment brought Bucky to Hawkeye.

Clinton Francis Barton. Now there was an interesting man with interesting problems. The most pressing being, namely, the ongoing conflict he had with the local mob in Bed Stuy. Fortunately for Clint, track suit mafias were easily taken care of when you didn't worry about silly little things like murder charges. Bucky added "put the fear of the Winter Soldier into some gangsters" on his to-do list.

The hard part of his current objective of protecting Barton would be his family. Because against all odds, he'd managed to get married and have kids and live a normal life in between saving the world. Bucky was going to have to go all the way to the middle of nowhere Iowa to get at the Barton homestead. There, of course, was no way it wasn't his next stop after he finished all the prep and planning he could.

Dr. Bruce Banner. Bucky watched the videos, read the reports, and pondered over the man's very unique situation.

There wasn't any way, short of assassination, for Bucky to solve the issue of the asshole Thunderbolt Ross. Tony Stark seemed to have that situation under control anyway. What Bucky was really mulling over was if there was a way to help the man with his control of the other half of his soul, the Hulk. And it was a part of the man's very soul. That much was obvious to Bucky's eyes even through shaky cellphone footage of the giant green being. Helping Banner would require a shit ton of study and research and dredging through the magic texts Rebecca had hoarded over the years.

It awakened the long buried enthusiasm for solving magical puzzles that had made Bucky one of the most powerful and innovative witches in the state of New York, if not the East Coast. Unfortunately that would have to be one of the last things on his to-do list. It wasn't time sensitive. He had more immediate things to worry about.

Which turned Bucky's attention to Tony Stark. The man had more enemies than the entirety of the United States of America it seemed. Eighty percent of them Stark had well in hand; lawyers and money spread around like butter on toast. Another fifteen percent could be blown up with the Iron Man suit. But it was that last five percent that Bucky resolved to deal with.

A mix of rage and comradery burned in Bucky's chest as he looked through medical reports and chest x-rays. Every second of his life, Tony had shrapnel digging to get at his heart. The casing for the Arc Reactor had cut his lung capacity almost in half. Not the least of it, lingering damage from the Palladium poisoning had rendered him sterile.

That more than anything would be the most complicated part of Bucky's new mission. Brewing the potions and weaving the spells would be the easy part. Getting into the tower to spike Tony's food or switch out the potions was going to be the hard part. But Bucky wasn't the most feared assassin in a hundred years for nothing. With planning and opportunity he should be able to get it done.

The one member Bucky was utterly sure he didn't have to worry about was Crown Prince Thor, God of Thunder. The alien spent half his time on his own planet and when he was on Earth he was resilient to most weaponry he was likely to encounter and could go toe to toe with the Hulk. He also, Bucky observed sitting on the roof of his building watching Thor's lightning arc through the sky, had his own kind of magic. He didn't need Bucky's.

Steve.

Rebecca told Bucky she had Steve blessed and warded with his full knowledge. He had sigils soaked into his shield, magic knots sewn into his uniform, and talismans hung up in his apartment in Avengers Tower. The only thing Steven Grant Rogers didn't have were battle spells painted on his naked skin over the entirety of his body.

Battle spells were something only a fellow soldier, a brother in arms could give you. It was an intimate process and only someone you trust utterly and completely, someone in whose hands you willingly put your life could perform on you. Anything less and it was just body paint and meaningless words.

Back in the war, a life time ago, before every mission Steve would strip down and let Bucky paint him up and chant his magic words to sink the magic into his skin.

Now, though, Bucky had tried to kill his heart's brother and Steve had spent the last few months thinking his best friend had been scooped out and replaced with a weaponized automaton.

That effortless trust was gone, tattered and torn, and stained in blood. Bucky wouldn't be painting any battle spells on his brother of the soul for a long while yet.

He'd just have to content himself with protecting Steve's teammates and the tower he lived in.

Warding a physical structure was both simple and complicated. Homestead warding was simple, protection from weather, theft, invasions of human and creature, good health and fortune for those that lived there, etc. Pretty standard stuff.

Warding Avengers Tower was going to be much, much more complex. It was all a permanent residence, place of innovation and discovery, base of operations, and beacon of freedom and hope. Each of these kinds of places required different wards and some of the wards conflicted with others. Calculating the correct combination and placement of wards for the Tower was going to be akin to inventing a language and writing a story in it.

One of the components to weaving that kind of magic was deciding what Bucky wanted in that warding story. He needed to know what kinds of threats he was supposed to be protecting the Tower from and in order to discover that he needed to look into the past, future, and present.

He needed a mirror. He could borrow his sister's, but he needed to start rebuilding to his magic tool collect so he walked to the antique shop Rebecca pointed him to.

Wandering through the aisles, Bucky touched every reflective surface he passed with a breeze of his magic upon his fingertips. You could find mirrors specifically created for scrying, soaked in generic magic and sold next to crystal balls and tarot cards. There was nothing wrong with them, but the Barnes witches were traditionalists. Hand spelled mirrors that came by their unique magic naturally were so much more powerful.

Bucky was halfway through the shop when his felt an icy chill run down his spine. There was a mirror in a simple weathered wooden frame perched on a dressing table to his left. Its third owner had been murdered by her husband in 1939. Strangled while touching up her make-up for a rendezvous with her not-so-secret lover. Her spirit was trapped in the mirror and crying out for release.

The mirror was medium sized and rectangular, the reflective surface was dotted with tarnish, etched with a delicate floral design along the top. Bucky couldn't stop staring at his reflection in it and listening to the woman's cries of sorrow.

Slowly he stepped toward the mirror and reached out to touch it. The barest touch of his flesh along the wooden frame told him what he needed to do. Pulling the glove off his left hand, Bucky placed his metal index finger to the exact center of the mirror. He pressed slow and steady until there was a delicate crunch and a crater the size of the tip of his finger caved in the glass. A breathy sob of relief echoed through the shop.

Bucky felt the woman's soul depart for her afterlife and the mirror was left only with the mark of his magic of mercy.

"Is everything alright, sir?"

Turning from the mirror, Bucky gave the old man, the owner, a reassuring smile. "Yep. I'll take this one." He gestured with his flesh thumbed over his shoulder at the mirror, keeping his left hand in his jacket pocket until he could put his glove back on. "How much?"

The old man looked around him and eyed the mirror dubiously. "You sure, son? It's cracked."

Bucky looked at the perfectly round fingertip sized shatter in the exact center. He looked back at the man and nodded. "Very sure."

He left the shop minus fifty Hydra dollars and plus a wooden framed mirror wrapped in brown paper.

Swinging by the local craft store on his way home, Bucky picked up a set of etching tools. Becca had lent him a few of her spell books so he could start refreshing his memory. He'd come across an enchantment for creating a scrying mirror that would require him to brush up on his etching.

Work area set up in his living room, Bucky was sitting at his curbside table. There were two books open next to him, a fraying ribbon marking the page in one and a receipt for dish soap and a six pack of coke marking the other. The book on his left had the instructions written in turn of the century Romanian for creating a magic mirror. The book in front of him, a rune, sigil, and symbol dictionary, had the magic characters Bucky was going to use in his casting documented throughout its pages.

It took him the rest of the evening to configure a combination of runes he was satisfied with, then it took him through the night to copy them over and over and over again until he was satisfied with his penmanship, so to speak. Over seventy years he'd lost some of his muscle memory and he couldn't afford to screw up the precision of the runes. The mirror was the only one that would work for him, the only one he would ever have a connection to so he needed it to be perfect.

The sun was just breaking over the horizon, peeking out between the high-rises, when Bucky finally started lining up his tools. A copy of the rune equation on his left, the mirror in front of him, and his etching tools on his right.

There was no incantation needed for this, no special potion, just a steady hand and an accurate rune equation.

The mirror was two feet tall and one and half feet wide, its wooden frame was attached to wooden legs, and would seesaw on an axis with a gentle nudge. Another look at the sheet of runes, and Bucky picked up a thin sharp implement and painstakingly etched the first character in the top left hand corner just beneath the decorative design already across the top.

One by one Bucky went down the left side of the mirror, etching intricate lines and curves in the delicate antique mirror glass. It took him almost an hour to finish transferring the first third of the equation. The last rune in the first sequence was the first rune in the second, and the last rune in the second sequence would be the last rune in the third.

The last third of the equation was going to be the hardest because it would have to be transcribed onto the mirror backwards, from the bottom up, end to beginning.

It took the entire morning and through lunch before Bucky was done. His hand was numb and his back ached, but looking at the perfectly composed equation, elegant runes nearly lovingly etched into the glass it was worth it.

Pride filled his chest and he couldn't help smiling at his work. It felt so, so good to be working his magic again. Every spell, potion, charm, incantation, talisman healed just a little bit more of his battered soul.

The process of creating a scrying mirror was surprisingly uncomplicated. The hardest part being calculating the rune equation and etching it into the glass. With that done there was only one more step and then Bucky was finished and he would finally have his means of seeing the past, future, and present.

Metal fingers wiggled into Bucky's jean pocket and pulled out his lighter; returned to him by Rebecca who'd received it with his affects after he was declared KIA. He'd taken it from the first enemy soldier he'd ever killed. Death magic, unlike the merciful Death spell cast to ease a person's passing, was dark and easily twisted to evil purposes.

The lighter had been a prized possession of the soldier and his violent death had shadowed it with dark magic. It had called to Bucky so Bucky took it. He carved the Romanian symbol for forgiveness onto one side of the lighter and the symbol for warrior on the other. His magic kept the darkness from twisting the lighter, from making it into an instrument of evil. Instead it was an instrument of chaos and mischief. Many an explosive fuse was touched off and arson of enemy property was lit with its flame. Not to mention lighting up the occasional reefer cigarette, when they could get their hands on one.

His metal thumb popped the top and flicked the flint. Filled with fresh oil and new wick, it lit with ease. Right hand pretty much useless until his knockoff serum fixed the strain and swelling in his muscles, Bucky's metal hand lifted the lighter with a gentle whirring of gears and lightly touched the flame to the very first rune in the equation.

The runes smoldered in a domino effect along the equation. When the orange embers died out on the last rune, they were all frosted like the original floral embellishment decorating the top of the mirror. To the untrained eye the runes would look like a continuation of the design. A handy bit of camouflaging, Bucky thought.

His scrying mirror hummed with magic and Bucky put it and his tools back in their proper places. His stacked the books back with the others he'd borrowed and decided he was starving. The serum did give him the metabolism of a humming bird after all. Time to head to the Jewish deli Rebecca had recommended and clean out their stock for the day.

* * *

The next day, rested with his hunger satisfied and his hand recovered, Bucky tried to decide which he should do first. Scry for threats, or begin weaving the protections and charms for Steve's new friends. Ever the strategist, he decided it was more efficient to do his threat assessments first then he could plant his gifts and ward their homes at the same time.

Sitting on his third hand couch, Bucky opened his brand new moleskin notebook, clicked his pen, and turned his attention to his mirror set before him on his coffee table.

He focused on the glass, not looking at his reflection, but through it, into the distance. It began to fog up and Bucky intoned the incantation.

"Mirror, mirror reveal it all,

Show me their enemies from rise to fall."

Like a gentle cascade of a waterfall, the images and stories started materializing in the glass, bright technicolor tales playing out before Bucky's eyes and in his mind. His pen glided across the pages of his notebook in his elegant, nun trained handwriting. Page after page, never taking his eyes off the glass, Bucky recorded everything the mirror showed him.

The notebook was three-quarters of the way filled when the pictures and stories started slowing down. They tapered off and Bucky's vision returned to the here and now in the sun lit living room of his Hydra stolen Brooklyn apartment.

Bucky clicked the pen again, dropped it on the coffee table and flipped back to the beginning of the notebook. He started on page one and by page five he realized this was going to take a hell of a lot longer than he thought.

He'd seen a multitude of things. Each Avenger could have a saga written about their enemies alone. Some dangers were weeks, months, a season in the future, some years, decades, or in Thor's case centuries away.

Past enemies and dangers were surprisingly shorter lists than present and future, but no less important. They gave context and offered hints on how to combat the things to come.

Dr. Bruce Banner for instance. The mirror had shown more of Thunderbolt Ross. While not Hydra, his goals disgustingly enough had run parallel with theirs more often than not. Bucky could remember the higher ups planning ways to recruit and if that failed manipulate him into doing their bidding.

He'd seen just how much death and destruction the fanatical general would catalyst in the future. And unfortunately as powerful and innovative as Bucky was there was only so much his magic could do. But, good thing is, Tony Stark was already taking steps to handle Ross. Even so, Bucky could think of any number of ways to protect Banner and keep Ross occupied, magically and mundanely if the need should arise.

Tony Stark had a lot of enemies scattered across his past, plotting in his present, and or poised for his future. He could handle plenty without any help, but a few of them bore watching. The ridiculousness with the Mandarin being one of them.

Of course, the danger that most sent Bucky's heart racing in panic and fear, was the playact of Iron Man facing off against Captain America. Neither coming out the victor. Just destroyed friendships and broken bodies. He'd seen that tragedy from two sides, Stark and Steve. Both just as tragic and unacceptable as the other.

Pulling neon orange sticky tabs from the package next to him, Bucky stuck two in the notebook, one for Stark's story and one for Steve's.

For all the Avengers Loki Odinson-Laufeyson-Prince of Asgard-rightful King of Jotunnheim-God of Mischief seemed to be a reoccurring nuisance. His heart and his mind were troubled, broken, crying out in agonizing pain. Though he hid it well; behind walls of so much crazy like you wouldn't believe. Sitting on Thor's throne on another planet, there wasn't anything Bucky could do. Help him or stop him, Bucky's hands were tied so he marked him as a thing to be watched.

Clint Barton was easy. The Avenger's enemies were his enemies. Apart from the tracksuit mafia and a bitchy soccer mom plotting PTA sabotage against his wife, his enemies would be seen to with the others'.

Except for the twins. The Maximoff twins. Wanda and Pietro. They were the Avengers' enemies as a whole, but they had a special connection to Barton. Bucky couldn't see what it was though. It wasn't quite enemy and it wasn't quite friend. He'd scryed for danger and while the twins were dangerous, stained in unnatural, irredeemably twisted, abominable magic from a different world, to Clint Barton they were something else as well. He just couldn't put his finger on what.

He marked them for further study, maybe a more specific scrying. They were connected to Hydra after all. He was damned sure to cover all his bases on that front.

It took a couple hours and nearly his whole supply of color coded sticky tabs, but Bucky steadfastly worked his way through the notebook of danger. No one could accuse him of not doing his due diligence.

The next day Bucky payed a visit to his little sister and cleaned her out of every book on warding and protection magics she had. Which, since she'd had eighty some-odd years to collect them, was a lot.

* * *

It took him another two days of review and planning and pages and pages of considered and discarded warding story drafts, before Bucky was satisfied. A day and a half of nonstop magic weaving and he had a collection of about two dozen talismans and a quart of his own blood freshly bled into a couple of mason jars.

The trip to Iowa, to the Barton homestead was anticlimactic after all that preparation, always the hardest, most time consuming part of magic.

Walking the borders of the three hundred and sixty acre farm planting talismans at the four major points of the compass then walking it again planting talismans at the four minor points of the compass was just good exercise. It was a good thing Barton seemed to be in New York or out on mission when Bucky moved inward to plant another eight around the farmhouse itself. There was no way a seasoned spyssassin like Barton wouldn't have noticed the chickens' indignant middle of the night squawking when Bucky had to bury a talisman in the middle of their coop.

He waited for Laura Barton to take her kids to school the next morning before he planted two talismans on either side of the gate leading onto the property. Then he waited until she was busy cooking dinner before he planted one in her car, one in the farm truck parked in the barn and the last four on the major compass points around the barn itself.

That done, the foundations laid, Bucky waited until late that night when the full moon was high and heavy in the sky.

He knelt in the middle of the drive just outside of the gate and dipped a paintbrush in the jar of his blood. He used half the quart painting warding symbols and sigils on the gate and its posts. The other half quart was painstakingly dripped in precise symbols onto the gravel drive itself.

A heartbeat after the very last drop of Bucky's blood fell from his paintbrush the magic took hold and sank unfathomably deep into the earth. The air surrounding the farm pulsed with the beat of the earth, the pressure in the atmosphere grew almost painful, and the silence rang deafeningly.

Then it was over and the sounds of crickets in the grass and the hooting of that one stubborn owl roosting in the barn could be heard again.

Bucky sucked in a breath like coming up from under water then his eyes rolled in the back of his head and he keeled over in utter magical and physical exhaustion. He stayed there sprawled twisted at an uncomfortable angle on the gravel drive, a stained paintbrush and two rusty ringed mason jars tipped over next to him. Hours he stayed there unconscious, thirstily soaking up the ambient magic that bubbled up from the earth.

When the cock crowed as the sun just started to look toward the horizon, Bucky finally fluttered his eyes open. He was still utterly exhausted, but he was the kind of exhausted after an over taxing workout. Too long it's been since he'd performed any kind of magic near this scope. Not just on a physical large scale, but with the intention of permanency. That kind of magic takes experience and careful pacing of oneself.

Neither of which Bucky had when he set out to ward Clinton Francis Barton's home and family.

He overreached, overestimated his own ability after seventy years of magical atrophy and rushed headlong into one of the most complicated and difficult forms of magic. No consideration to the possible consequences for himself. A novice's mistake and one his ma would have tanned his hide for.

As it was, Bucky was lucky he had woken up before the next full moon at all. Had he been anyone else. Had he less of a connection to his hereditary magic, a natural talent. Had he not been physically near indestructible, he very well could have killed himself. At the very least irreversibly damaged his connection to his magic by draining himself like that.

Bucky shakily shoved his supplies back in the bag and dragged it and his aching body off into the trees that surrounded the property. He collapsed under a massive oak, closed his eyes, and just concentrated on breathing in the earth magic misting in the morning air. Lesson learned, he thought to himself wryly deprecating, no more warding large areas without preparation.

He wasn't able to move again until afternoon was sliding into evening and even then he staggered weakly toward his rental. The trip back to Brooklyn was not pleasant.

Of course the epic scolding he got from Rebecca the second she saw him after couple days of a near healing coma was even less pleasant. Though it served to truly drive the point home. He needed to take more care of himself, not just others.

"You don't have to do this," Rebecca shouted at him even as she wrapped a chartreuse fleece blanket around his shoulders and shoved a steaming bowl of stew at him, scowling until he started eating. "You have nothing to prove, Jamie."

"Yes, I do." Bucky looked into his sister's furious worried blue eyes and said, "Yes, I do. I need to prove they haven't taken anything from me, that I got back all that they stole. I need to prove that I can still do more than just kill and maim and destroy."

"Oh, Jamie," Rebecca sighed and stroked a soothing hand over his hair pausing to cradle his cheek. "You are a good man, Jamie. They couldn't have taken that away from you if they had a map and an instruction manual. Creation, protection, love," she smiled at him sad and sweet, "that has always been what you're best at."

Bucky spent the most restful night he'd had in close to ninety years sleeping on his sister's lumpy, floral print sofa surrounded by the love permeating her things and her magic layered around them.

* * *

He approached the story weaving of the wards for Avengers – _Stark-_ Tower with more caution.

It took a month before he was ready. For the Tower wards at least. The individual spells and talismans for the Avengers themselves would have to wait just a while longer.

Urban warding presented its own brand of difficulties. Such as there could be no burying of talismans. Not unless you wanted to take a jackhammer to concrete and asphalt out in the open or go into the sewer system and attach them to slimy walls. Neither of which Bucky was prepared to do. Not only would no amount of notice –me-not spells would be able to hide a random guy jackhammering up a busy sidewalk or street, but his enhanced sense of smell would probably be permanently fried. That particular stench of New York sewer just didn't wash out with anything less than watered down bleach.

So Bucky was working with the handicap of only being able to use runes and symbols and sigils for the first part of the warding story. Not insurmountable but it would stretch his abilities and ingenuity.

In the end Bucky took inspiration from the etching technique he used on his scrying mirror. Modified of course because concrete and asphalt were a much less pliable substance than an antique silver backed mirror.

On the morning of the new moon, Bucky started the first part of his three chapter warding story for the Avengers Tower.

Because a tall, dark, mildly sketchy looking man wandering around a high profile building carrying a burning branding iron was a little much for Bucky's stealth spell, he had to borrow a hide-in-plain-sight talisman from Rebecca. He would have made one himself, but he needed all the magic he could spare just for the setting of the first chapter.

On the four points of the compass rose, Bucky poured some of his magic into the branding iron. It glowed white hot and every time he touched the burning tip to the stained concrete it seared a different rune. Four runes at each of the four points and Bucky started to breathe a little harder, wiping sweat from his eyes. By that time it was noon and he figured he'd follow Rebecca's stern instructions and break for a large lunch and about a gallon of water.

An hour later, full from a red meat heavy lunch and freshly hydrated, Bucky was back to continue with the minor points of the compass rose. Four runes at each four points and finally by midafternoon, the first chapter of warding on the Tower was finished.

He slept heavy that night, but still got up early in the morning and carted a gallon milk jug of his blood all the way to Manhattan.

The second chapter of warding story was more time consuming and intricate as well as magically exhausting. Even though there was already magic in his collected blood, it was his blood and even out of his body had a connection to him. So painting the runes around the Tower in his blood would still draw on him.

In between each cluster of runes on the compass points, Bucky painted a circle of runes in carefully crafted equations. Each circle was a different equation for a different aspect of the wards and they had to be exact. In other words time consuming detail work.

A stop for lunch when he finished painting around the base of the Tower, and Bucky made his way to the front entrance of the Tower for the second half of the second chapter.

Now while the first part was tiring, the second was going to drain him nearly dry. That is, it would if he hadn't come prepared. Rebecca insisted on packing him a large bag of high calorie snacks and electrolyte heavy sports drinks.

Front doors, main entrances, gateways, even drawbridges and portcullises, pretty much any and every type of primary entranceway were the most magically important feature of a place. There could be a hundred and one backdoors, but the only door that had to be warded was the front. So it was that Bucky stood before the massive front entrance to Avengers Tower and grimaced.

It took up a good portion of the entire front face of the building and was a collection of revolving, automatic, and good old fashioned push-pull doors. There was no way to ward each individual entry, so Bucky was going to paint the blood runes up the side of the first door on the left then across the top of them all the way to the outside of the last door on the right.

He was going to be working out in the open in broad daylight so it called for a few extra camouflage plain-sight talismans –also curtesy of Rebecca- and some props to help along the illusion.

I.e. Bucky dressed like a window cleaner complete with caution cones and scaffolding.

From 1:15pm to 7:48 Bucky painstakingly painted his seemingly endless equation of blood runes across the top of every door on the front of the Tower. Pausing only to shift the scaffolding, cones, and everything six feet to the right over and over again as he went along.

It was tedious and exhausting and not without its moments of alarm. At one point Bucky was almost sure he was going to have to run for it, disappear into the city, and back into hiding.

Tony Stark had suddenly appeared in front of his own building and stared at the lonely window cleaner blocking up two doors to his –sorry- _Avengers_ Tower.

Tony squinted at the guy seemingly totally focused on his job. He was utterly unremarkable and the moment Tony put his eyes on him he already forgot what he looked like.

"Pep, I thought the window cleaners came last week."

Pepper Potts paused midsentence and didn't even bother to glance up from her tablet toward the scaffolding and caution cones. "Tony, you've never cared about building maintenance."

Tony tilted his head in contemplation then shrugged, "Good point." He pushed his sunglasses back up his nose and turned away swaggering through one of the revolving doors.

Bucky watched out of the corner of his eye as the billionaire and his CEO disappeared inside. He blew out a tense breath and internally cursed himself.

He should have realized, should have remember his ma's lessons. When a person builds something with their own two hands, witch or not, they put a little of themselves into it. Some even put their heart and soul into it. In Tony Stark's case literally since the Arc Reactor, the thing that keeps him alive, is also the thing that gives the Tower life.

If he'd been magically inclined even just a little bit, all of Bucky's stealth magic, notice-me-nots, and plain-sights wouldn't have done a lick of good. Good intentions or not, Bucky was messing with Tony's heart and soul, the man would not have been able to ignore that.

At 7:48pm, Bucky finished the last stroke on the last rune in the equation. He exhaled exhaustedly and the equation lit up in a domino effect to glow like embers. The air grew almost unbearably heavy, all the city noise was abruptly snuffed out in ringing silence, and time paused for a long heartbeat.

Then the runes soaked in and the atmosphere dissipated. Bucky sucked in a breath collapsing next to the now near invisible blood runes. Tilting his head back against the cool glass, he soaked up some of the edgy ambient magic of the city. It buoyed him up enough he could snag his snack bag and tear open a package of peanuts. Dumping the whole thing in his mouth he chewed twice and washed it down with an entire bottle of neon blue sports drink.

It was another twenty minutes until Bucky felt strong enough to groaningly get to his feet and start taking down his camouflage set up. He left the dismantled scaffolding and orange cones around the side of the building for some confused maintenance guy to discovered later then he dragged his feet all the way back to Brooklyn.

Even with the snacks and rest and rehydration, he knew the warding had taken a lot out of him. He probably shouldn't be alone if he had a hope in hell of getting up the next morning to finish the third and final chapter of the warding story. He bypassed his Hydra apartment all together and trudged through Rebecca's building and right up to her apartment. Collapsing face first on her sofa, Bucky was out before his sister could even scold him for not knocking.

* * *

"Well, are you happy with yourself now?" woke him up the next morning.

Bucky groaned and buried his head under a tasseled throw pillow hiding away from the early morning sunlight and his sister's unimpressed inquiry.

"I thought I told you to pace yourself."

A heavy beleaguered sigh. "I did pace myself," Bucky grumbled. "I even ate all your snacks."

"Hmph!" Rebecca turned away from her brother to finish frying them up some breakfast. "Maybe next time you'll think twice before you go warding every skyscraper in New York City."

Snorting, Bucky pulled his head out from under the tasseled monstrosity and rolled his eyes at her back. "Pretty sure it's only the one skyscraper I'll ever have to ward."

"You don't have to do anything." The sound of sizzling bacon did nothing to cover up Rebecca's resentful mutter.

Finally getting to his feet, Bucky wandered into the little kitchen and leaned against the counter next to the stove. He crossed his arms and took a moment to study his sister's unhappy, worried scowl. She refused to look at him, focusing all her attention on her cooking.

"Becca."

She scowled harder and accidentally flicked a strip of bacon out of the pan with a rough twist of her fork.

Bucky reached over and picked it up with his metal fingers dropping it back in the pan. "Rebecca, will you look at me?"

She relented, barely, tilting her face toward him just enough to meet his serious gaze out of the corner of her eye.

"I've done a lot of very terrible things for a very long time. I may have my mind and memories back, but those wounds will forever be on my soul." He squeezed her shoulder soothingly when she opened her mouth to protest. "Steve and his team do a lot of very good things. If I can help them, protect them, maybe those wounds will scar and fade a little sooner."

Rebecca had since lifted her head fully to look at her brother. It hurt her. He had suffered so much and he should be the one being protected and cared for. But James Buchanan Barnes had never let anyone take care of him. He picked up neglected strays and lonely forgottens like pennies from the street. Every one was a better, more deserving being than him and trying to argue that with him gained you nothing but a hurting heart and a splitting headache.

"But who's going to help and protect you?"

A sympathetic, unintentionally condescending reassurance was on the tip of his tongue, but Rebecca silenced him with a raised hand.

"Don't." She took a steadying breath. "Just don't. You go on and work yourself to the bone for these overpowered, self-entitled children, but don't you try and tell me not to do everything I can to take care of you. You just go on and do your thing and I'll just go on and make sure you don't kill yourself doing it."

Bucky watched his little sister for a long moment knowing she was perfectly serious. He was pretty sure if he didn't let her do as she pleased, she would just knock him over the head and tie him to her pullout couch with a knit blanket and a bowl of chicken soup. If he was being completely honest with himself, something he tended to neglect to do usually to his own detriment, having Rebecca fuss and belligerently coddle him comforted him in ways he'd long forgotten.

In the end, as with all Barnes women, it was better to just let her do what she will and keep out of her way.

"Alright, Becca," he gave a wry smile to answer her dubiously raised eyebrow. "I'll try. For you, I'll try to let you take care of me."

Rebecca huffed and scowled at him again. "i _Try/i_! You damn well better try. I still got Mama's wooden spoon, you know. A good smack with it still hurts like a son of a-"

"Language," Bucky scolded with a grin. The heaviness between them finally lifted with the return of their sibling banter.

She made a derisive sound and negligently dumped the finished bacon on a plate. Bucky yelped and jumped away when a splatter of hot grease burned his arm.

Rebecca tossed him a dish towel and barely held in her vindictive smirk as he sullenly rubbed at his long since healed arm. "Stop being a baby and hand me the eggs."

Bucky did as he was told with a hard roll of his eyes. They spent the rest of breakfast bickering and picking at each other like they were still tripping over one another in their small family apartment back in Brooklyn.

* * *

The third and final chapter of the warding story Bucky had outlined for Avengers Tower was the simplest magically but the most complicated strategically.

It involved a lot of air vents, elevator shafts, and precariously hanging upside down on the outside of a ninety-three story, 1,130 foot tall high rise.

It was also the most fun Bucky'd had since jumping on top a speeding train in the Austrian Alps. He'd forgotten that before Hydra got their grubby hands on him and ruined everything good in his world, he'd actually been a bit of an adrenalin junky. Where do you think Steve learned it from?

Filled with a warm breakfast and carting a climber's pack back to Manhattan Bucky paused outside the massive tower and checked for the third time that he had all his stealth talismans and charms on him. Hiding in plain sight on the street was one thing. Hiding inside the home of a team of superheroes was another thing altogether. Hiding in someone else's territory is always tricky, private property in general didn't tend to appreciate interlopers and Bucky figured the Tower would be especially territorial considering it was the literal body of a super intelligent, semi-sentient AI.

Hydra had an entire file on the dangers posed by Tony Stark's cyber butler. JARVIS had the same threat level as the Iron Man suit. Bucky was going to have to exercise every single one of his assassin skills and stealth magics to make his job possible.

Getting the building plans filed with the city was simple. Comparing them to the Hydra pilfered blueprints gave Bucky a good picture of the inner floors and an idea of the wards he'd have to specially tailor to them. When the Tower was just Stark, the top ten floors not including the penthouse were R-n-D. After the retrofit post-Chitauri Invasion, those floors became personal labs and workshops for Stark and Banner, training facilities for the other Avengers, and private and communal living areas for the whole team.

Each floor would need its own type of warding and the task was looking to be a long and arduous one.

So it was that Bucky was now scaling up eighty-three stories in an elevator shaft to get to the first in a inconveniently large number of floors that needed his attentions. It was perilous, required caution, and put the beginnings of a manic grin on his face. JARVIS had motion sensors at every floor so as Bucky ascended beyond each one he had to pause for a minute and a half to give his magics the chance to delicately misdirect the surveillance. By his estimation if all worked like it was supposed to, he shouldn't even register as a presence in the Tower. He would be a ghost.

Fortunately that wasn't an unfamiliar state of being for him.

When he reached the first of his destinations he silently unscrewed the ventilation panel and shimmied inside with barely a whisper of cloth.

Then it was only a matter of navigating his way through the unusually large ductwork (a gift from Tony to Clint he'd find out later) to the outer most point of the floor. Pausing at that Northern end of the ducts, Bucky slid his hand into his backpack and pulled out a roll of duct tape and one of a seemingly endless supply of the different warding talismans he'd made.

Tearing off a strip of tape with his teeth, Bucky stuck the talisman on to ceiling of the vent and covered it in tape 'til it was just a lump of grey against the metal. Stowing the tape away, Bucky smoothly shimmied back to the last junction and turned off toward the East.

Around the major compass points then around again to the minor points, Bucky used up a third of the roll of duct tape before he moved on up to the next floor.

He did that over and over again using different talismans each for the training floors, the labs and workshops, the communal living areas, and the personal quarters. When he finally got to the aircraft hangar at the top of the Tower he had to descend from the vents and ghost around the wide open space carefully avoiding cameras and sensors, the ever watchful eyes of JARVIS.

The roof of the Tower was the most puzzling bit of magic he had to weave because it couldn't conflict with the Asgardian magic already rooted there. A magic Bucky knew little to nothing about. While he'd been plotting out the wards he'd spent an entire weekend combing through the Hydra and SHIELD files on their studies of Thor's Hammer and the readings they took from his first landing site in New Mexico. Eventually Bucky decided he would have to feel it for himself.

The two way trip to Puerto Antigo and back took a full twenty-seven hours. And it was worth it when Bucky was standing in the center of the massive intricate knot work burned into the dry desert ground.

The magic was utterly foreign. Like nothing Bucky had ever felt before and vice versa. The second he'd stepped into the center of the symbol the breath was knocked out of him from the force of the near overwhelming curious alien magic slamming into him.

It had never felt anything like Bucky either. Which was surprising. You'd think since the Norse gods had come thousands of years before and made such an impression on Earth's people that their magics would have at least recognized the native powers.

Apparently not, because Bucky spent an hour communing with the small bit of alien magic lingering in the knots, basically shaking hands in a meet-n-greet for lack of a better description. When he finally convinced it he had magic superiority in the realm of Midgard he had a pretty good handle on the Asgardians and how they worked, magically as well as culturally.

They all had very high opinions of themselves, the Asgardians did, and they had the nasty habit of thinking themselves above pretty much everyone else. High handed entitled old busybodies with god complexes. Their magic wasn't any more humble. Bucky hadn't had to give such a serious dressing down since he'd been task master and teacher to a dozen tiny ballerinas.

Stepping out of the symbol, Asgardian magics now firmly put in their place, Bucky felt eyes on him. He paused in walking back to his rented jeep and gave the intruding gaze a firm smack on the nose. He got a lightning fast impression of startled golden eyes then Bucky was left to his privacy once again.

Like he said, high handed busybodies.

The pavement on the roof of the Tower was burned with the same style of knot work as the site in New Mexico. Bucky didn't have any reason to converse with the foreign magics for his warding so he ignored the lightly smoking symbol and worked his way around the landing pad. Punching holes in the ground with his metal fist Bucky planted the talismans and covered them up again. A whisper of his magic resealed the concrete unblemished.

It was evening by that time and Bucky pulled out his Hydra pilfered climbing gear. A pair of magnetic gloves and magnetic toe caps for his boots. The technology was a little hit or miss when the weather was being uncooperative, but it had been used successfully before, both by the intelligence agency Hydra stole it from and by Bucky.

Supply belt secure at his waist, Bucky climbed over the edge of the roof and slowly, steadily descended the Tower's glass façade to the Iron Man landing platform. With extra caution, he transferred his magnetized holds to the installation jutting out from the side of the building. Now clinging to the underside of smooth, polished steel, Bucky crawled like a spider to the dead center of the mechanized suit dismantling landing pad.

Ever so carefully he pulled out the last talisman and his third roll of duct tape. In a matter of seconds he had the thing secured to the bottom of the platform. There was a faint tremor in the air, there and gone again, when the last bit of tape had covered the talisman signaling the magic settling in, permeating into the very fibers of the Tower.

His job well done, Bucky started crawling his way back to the main building to begin his ascent back to the roof.

Of course that was the very moment a great gust of wind blew past him and the caps on his shoes lost their grip.

Heart pounding in a heady mix of fear and exhilaration, Bucky swayed in the breeze. Clinging precariously to the underside of the platform by the magnetic tips of his fingers, over a thousand feet up, he risked a glance down.

And let out a slightly hysterical giggle. "Oh, Becca is going to _kill_ me." The people on the sidewalk below looked like ants and yep, he was never telling his little sister about this.

Flexing his abdominal muscles, Bucky slowly lifted himself up 'til his toes tapped the steel and the magnetics gripped on again. Thankfully the rest of the climb back to the relatively safety of the roof was uneventful.

The trip back to the ground level down the elevator shaft took an hour and by the time Bucky finally exited the basement entrance stepping out onto the street he was buzzing with the satisfaction of a successful mission. The thrill of adrenaline from a good old-fashioned death defying stunt was still pumping through him.

In the mood to celebrate, Bucky made journey home to Brooklyn making a quick stop off at the little Romanian hole in the wall he'd discovered in his third week in the familiar borough. Twenty minutes later, laden down with steaming food just like their ma used to make, Bucky let himself into his sister's apartment. He greeted her stern glare and impatiently tapping toe with a grin.

"I brought dinner."

Rebecca eyed her brother suspiciously, eyed the food suspiciously, then eyed her brother again. "What did you do?"

"What makes you think I did something?" He blinked at her innocently as he started unloading the food on the kitchen table.

"You got that same look on your face as when you gave Ma flowers that time you bent her great-great-grandmother's ancient spell knife."

"I have no idea what you're talking about." Bucky waved a container of _sarmale_ , Romanian cabbage rolls, under her nose. "I got some of your favorites."

Rebecca scowled darkly, but snatched the box out of his hands. "Fine, don't tell me. But you better have gotten some _cozonac_."

Bucky dutifully passed over the walnut paste filled sweetbread. "Of course, dear sister. I didn't forget."

"Good lord," Rebecca scoffed around a mouthful of bread, rolling her eyes. "On second thought, don't tell me, I don't want to know what you did. Just shut up and go get some plates."

Dipping his head to hide his triumphant grin, Bucky went and got the plates, silverware, and napkins. When he got back to the table, Rebecca had already set out the rest of the food and was surreptitiously finger picking from the boxes.

Shaking his head at her unrepentant expression, Bucky handed over a plate and silverware and the siblings went about dividing up the food.

It was good and comforting and wonderful. Brother and sister spent the rest of the evening laughing and talking and remembering home. By the time the last takeout box had been licked clean, Bucky was calm and satisfied and Rebecca had a gentle smile on her lips.

There was still work to be done before Bucky was done protecting Steve's team and Rebecca was still fighting an uphill battle trying to take care of her stubborn brother, but for the moment, they were just content in each other's company. Content surrounded by love and family.

* * *

TBC...


	2. Nerver Truly Leave Us

**Title** : Chapter 2: Never Truly Leave Us

 **Pairing** : Bucky Barnes, Steve Rogers, Natasha Romanoff, Thor, Tony Stark

 **Series** : Witch Bucky

 **Genre** : Canon Divergence Post - CAWS

 **Warning** : Witch Bucky, Recovered Bucky, Magic, BAMF Bucky,

 **Summary** : The clues are there and the Avengers are starting notice. When Steve and Natasha put their heads together they were bound to get some answers one way or another.

* * *

The first clue, though Tony didn't know it, was the seen-and-forgotten window cleaner. The second clue was the momentary fritz in the Tower's entire electrical grid at precisely 7:38pm on a Tuesday. JARVIS flagged it and Tony checked it, but there was nothing. Literally nothing. Not even a pigeon pecking at a breaker box. Just a flicker then everything was working smoothly again.

The third clue –second to Tony since he didn't remember the first- was the complete lack of a presence on motion sensors and cameras.

"Sir, I have detected an anomaly in the security of the private elevator shaft, the ventilation system, the Avengers' private floors, the aircraft hangar, and Thor's landing pad."

"Alright, J," Tony swung around on his rolly stool and started tapping at the touchpad keyboard in front of his large monitors. "Pull it up for me."

The screens streamed with sensor readings and security footage. Tony scanned through them, but couldn't see anything of note. "I'm not seeing anything, J."

"That is precisely the problem, Sir," JARVIS responded. "There is a complete lack of data when my sensors should be recording ambient activity."

Tony scanned to the first anomaly at 9:30am, coincidentally on the same day as the flicker in the system. He went through the sensor readings first, eleven hours of flagged data. It would have been easy to miss if you weren't a genius with a hyper intelligent AI for an assistant. In other words, if you weren't Tony Stark. But he was Tony Stark, and Tony stared at the readings attempting to analyze the data, or utter lack of data as the case seemed to be.

At almost precisely timed intervals, one floor after another, the motion sensors in the private elevator shaft registered absolutely nothing. Then for several hours after that almost all the sensors in the ventilation system for the Avengers' floors had blank spots, too. Next were the cameras in the aircraft hangar, the roof and Thor's landing pad, and the outside of the building leading to his Iron Man landing platform, one after another. Then back down the Tower, the instances finally ending at 8:42pm.

By the timing and locations of the not-disturbances Tony would almost say it was someone methodically moving through his Tower. But that was impossible. JARVIS was _the_ security system. There wasn't any stealth technology known to man that he wouldn't register and identify. Hell, Tony had even analyzed and programmed in the readings from Loki's short infiltration and imprisonment in the Tower. Not even the God of Lies could move around his Tower undetected.

So the fact that something had obviously been in his Tower before, during, and after a seemingly insignificant electrical glitch was not cool.

"Scan all systems for infiltration," Tony ordered already furiously running simulations and calculations and a number of other subsequently useless - _ations_.

"No foreign presence detected," JARVIS concluded.

"Scan for unknown tech inside and outside the Tower."

A few minutes of JARVIS's searching eye moving through the Tower and he answered, "No unknown technology detected."

"Huh." Tony leaned back on his stool and stared at the screens trying to come up with any and or all explanations for the anomalies. "Yeah, I got nothin'."

Snatching up a lukewarm mystery smoothie, Tony took a grimacing gulp, coughed, then set it back down on the cluttered desk. "Run the readings again. Play back the camera footage."

He worked through the night, this new mystery nagging at him, spinning around in his head, his fingers working furiously at his calculations. By the time Pepper barged into the workshop the next afternoon furious that he'd skipped yet another board meeting, Tony and JARVIS were no closer to an answer.

* * *

With a rumble of thunder, a blinding flash of lightning, Thor touches down in the center of the after burn left by the Bifrost. And promptly stumbles.

Arms wind milling, Thor trips a couple steps before he half steadies himself with a vigorous shake of his buzzing head.

"What in Odin's name!"

He'd never felt magic like that before. His first thought was Loki had set a trap for him. Then he remembered his little brother dying in his arms and another shake of his head returned those thoughts back to the shadows of his mind.

The magic, because that's exactly what it was, was so different, so foreign from what he flowed in his bones that it was literally unbalancing him. Listing to the side Thor hopped, skipped, and tripped to the left 'til he passed over the last ring of knot work and touched plain concrete. The alarming seasick dizziness was abruptly gone causing Thor to blink confused a long moment before he finally got his bearings

Now that the two magics, Asgardian and whatever was suddenly permeating every inch of the Tower, weren't clashing with each other, Thor was better able to investigate, to examine the foreignness.

It was heady, this magic. Strong in power and feeling. It felt warm to his senses. It settled around him, wrapped him up, and let him go again. There wasn't a part of him the magic didn't touch before it misted away and sank back into the very fibers of the Tower.

"Strange," Thor murmured to himself as he hesitantly followed one of the gently pulsing beacons to the South-West point of the roof. The concrete was completely undisturbed at the origin and yet.

Crouching down, Thor gently set his fingertips to the spot only to snatch his hand away again. It shocked him!

Thread thin arcs of white-blue electric aftershocks sparked between his fingers for a long second. Staring at his hand wide eyed and bewildered Thor realized that hadn't happened to him since he was a boy. Since before he was given Mjolnir and learned to harness her might.

Looking back at the innocuous spot on the ground, Thor furrowed his brow. It had shocked him, but it hadn't been painful. If he was interpreting the sensation correctly, it hadn't intended to harm him at all. It had felt almost like… like a Midgardian handshake. Like a greeting.

Thor stood, spinning Mjolnir he lifted off into the air.

The moment he passed the boundary of the Tower the air felt different. Felt mostly empty of magic, like it had since he'd first come to this realm. It also felt colder. Like the small moment of chill after shaking off a warm blanket.

Turning midair he hovered in the sky and studied the Tower with clear-seeing eyes. An ability he'd learned from his mother, to look clearly, unencumbered, and see the nature of a thing.

And he saw how truly different the Tower was since his last visit almost two months ago. It was a beacon. Shining bright like the sun to all with even a touch of magic.

From its foundations to its peak this tower of steel and glass was a pillar of safety, a sentinel to guard all those within. Fiercely would it defend and protect, like a mother would her child. Thor shuddered at the thought of what would await any who tried to violate her sanctuary. He imagined they would come to regret that decision very quickly indeed.

With more caution, Thor flew back to the roof and felt this new magic wrap around him again, warm and heavy, then retreat soaking back into the Tower's fabric. Wary of repeating his first landing, Thor touched down outside the Asgardian knot work. As he made his way to the roof door his expression was still creased deep in thought.

* * *

Steve knew it probably wasn't healthy and it wasn't helping his search any, but he couldn't shake the feeling that if he just read the file one more time something, anything useful would reveal itself. It was a nauseating if dry read (what wasn't blacked out) and it was not made any less so by Steve's rusty '40s era Russian. The haunting pictures of Bucky in and out of cryo, with and without the gleaming utterly foreign metal arm, didn't help matters one bit.

Still, Steve sat at the kitchen table on the communal floor eating a lunch of cereal long gone soggy in room temperature milk reading the heavily redacted Soviet file on the Winter Soldier.

A deep sigh heaving from his chest, Steve slapped the file closed and shoved it away from himself, frustrated and angry.

Guilt and worry were an ever constant roiling mass in his gut. He was pretty sure if the serum didn't make it impossible, he'd have an ulcer the size of his fist by now.

He could have done more. He should have done more. Bucky was his best friend. His brother.

Steve grimaced and swallowed some unappetizing milky cereal down his tight throat.

His brother.

Little Becca Barnes was all grown up, a great-grandmother, had lived a good life, a long life. And she didn't know her beloved big brother had come back from the dead.

There was that guilt again. But he couldn't risk it. Couldn't risk that she'd go searching for Bucky and he wouldn't know her, like he didn't know Steve. That he'd hurt her.

There was no way of knowing just what frame of mind Bucky was in now, even months after Hydra's fall. Months on his own, with no allies, no friends, no help. There was no way of knowing Bucky wouldn't attack anyone that approached, just trying to protect himself.

Steve could take a beating like the Winter Soldier could dish out. Becca Barnes, for all that she was just as fierce in her eighties as she'd been in her teens, wouldn't stand a chance against a super soldier.

An old, dusty memory surfaced of Bucky and Becca standing over a smoking copper pot. Mischievous smirks on their faces as they cooked up something noxious and slimy to give Johnny Horowitz from down the street a burning rash on his privates.

What happened when a witch was brainwashed and tortured?

Did Bucky remember magic? Did he remember all the times he'd snuck into Steve's room and painted mysterious symbols on his chest to keep his lungs working? Did he remember the rough little charms he would fix up and give to the Howlies before every mission?

Did he remember Steve falling to his knees next to him in a muddy field in France? Did he remember instruction Steve to slice their palms open and grasp them together? Did he remember gasping for breath as he recited the spell for Steve to repeat in stumbling horribly accented Romanian?

Did he remember Steve uselessly trying to cover Bucky's gaping belly wound with trembling hands? Remember Steve begging him to-

" _Please, Buck! Please tell me what to do!"_

" _Steve- No, you c-can't-"_

" _No! Give it to me! I can take it! Give it to me!"_

" _Stevie…"_

" _Give me your wound, Bucky. Let me save you."_

It worked. Hurt like nothing he'd ever felt in his life, but it worked. Barely. Steve didn't have a lick of magic in him so, according to Bucky, the spell had drawn on their bond as best friends, brothers, soulmates of a kind. Steve had gotten Bucky's wound and the serum's healing had saved them both, but they'd been out of it for over a week afterward. The army doctors called it a stress coma. Bucky called it a healing sleep.

Either way, Bucky had lived. And Steve would take that pain a hundred times over if it meant Bucky coming back to him.

The Barnes's magic had never been something Steve could understand the intricacies of. And he hadn't really tried. To him it was just part of Bucky. The big jerk that goes and falls off a train leaving Steve holding the bag and all the stupid for the both of them.

"Reading that file over again isn't going to help, Steve."

Looking up from blankly staring at his squishy frosted flakes, Steve met Natasha's sympathetic green gaze.

"I know." He leaned back in his chair abandoning his pitiful meal for the moment. "Still can't stop myself."

"Regret pulling on that string?" Natasha inquired as she made her way over to the coffee machine, giving Steve's shoulder a comforting squeeze on her way past.

Steve watched her move then heaved a deep sigh. "No. He's alive out there somewhere and if I can just find him and help him, I'd do it all over again." And he would too. Bullet in the gut and near drowning included.

"Hopefully not all of it," Natasha drawled wryly, a slight quirk of a smile at her lips. She pulled mug covered in cartoon smiley spiders from the cabinet and glanced at him over her shoulder. "I could do without the strike missiles and collapsing buildings."

Giving a slight chuckle, Steve just shook his head and turned back to his unappetizing cereal bowl. Why was he even still eating this?

There was a rumble of thunder and a flash of lightning outside the wall of glass on the other side of the communal great room.

"Looks like Thor's back."

Steve glanced at the window just as the sky cleared. "Good, he owes me a rematch."

Natasha made an amused huff and turned around to lean against the counter sipping at her coffee, two tablespoons of sugar and a solid splash of cream.

They fell into companionable silence as they waited for their teammate, each of them deep in thought, their minds in the past.

Steve was turning over every bit of intel he'd gathered on Project Winter Soldier so far, yet again searching for clues in vain.

Natasha was back in the Red Room. Reliving the memories of a stern, blue eyed instructor with a metal arm and the lessons he gave her when their masters' attention was elsewhere. She thought back to those stolen hours with him, reliving his patient words and guiding hands. The awe and longing he inspired in her with every word of praise, no matter how seemingly insignificant.

Distant memories of the gentle tingle just under her skin when she'd intone the last word, or paint the last stroke, or add the last ingredient floated through her mind. They were far away, usually hidden with the other precious few good moments of her miserable childhood.

The elevator dinged and Thor walked into the kitchen with an expression of serious contemplation.

"Hey, Thor. How was –um- Valinor?"

"Greetings, Steven. My travels were uneventful."

"Well," Steve hedged, "that's good."

Thor hummed distractedly just standing in the kitchen doorway.

"Something on your mind, big guy?" Natasha asked with a raised eyebrow.

Thor looked at his shield mates with a thoughtful frown on his face. "I had not realized Midgard had its own magic users."

Steve sucked a cereal crumb down the wrong pipe and started coughing. "What- what makes you say that?" he rasped through the scratch in his throat.

"Did you not know?" Thor looked from Steve's reddened face to Natasha's carefully neutral expression.

"Know what?" The tone of her voice was off, no inflection whatsoever and Steve glanced at her curiously.

"Someone has laid protections on the Tower," Thor answered simply.

"Protections?" Heart suddenly pounding his chest, Steve couldn't keep from hoping.

"Yes," Thor frowned at them, confused by their odd reactions. "When I landed on the roof, the Tower's magic awoke. It greeted me and bid me welcome."

Natasha dropped her mug on the counter with a loud clatter, sloshing hot coffee over her hand. "Excuse me. I need to-" she didn't finish, rushing from the room.

Steve stared wide eyed after her, suspicion growing in his mind. "I gotta go, Thor. See you later!" He lunged out of his chair and raced after her.

Thor just shook his head at his friends' abrupt exit. Midgardians could be so strange.

* * *

Natasha took the elevator so Steve took the stairs.

He made it to her floor just in time to slam his arm across the door to her apartment abruptly halting her from opening it.

"You knew him."

"Steve-"

"No." Steve stared down at her piercingly. "You knew him. Somehow you knew him."

"Steve," Natasha tried to caution, "you really don't want to pull on this thread."

"Bullshit!" He slammed his hand against the doorjamb again in frustration. "Tell me how you knew him!"

Natasha startled and took a reflexive step back. "He was one of my trainers."

Brought up short, Steve stopped looming. "What do you mean?"

"When I was with the Red Room, they brought in an outsider." Natasha took a breath. "They called him _Zimniy Soldat_."

"Winter Soldier," Steve translated in a low murmur, heart falling. "He trained you." He knew some of Natasha's history, could imagine what sort of training she received, even from a disturbingly young age. The knowledge that Bucky had any kind of hand in that made him feel sick to his stomach.

"Nat," his voice was hoarse, "I'm so sorry."

"Stop." She held a hand up a stern expression on her face. "Stop, Steve. It wasn't bad. _He_ wasn't bad." Natasha gave him the very ghost of a reassuring smile. "He's actually some of my fondest memories."

Steve's eyes asked the silent question.

She glanced down at her hands, now grasped together, then back up at Steve before answering. "He wasn't nice, exactly, he couldn't be, but he was never cruel. He didn't hurt us outside of sparring and even then it was minimal as possible. He was – _is_ \- the greatest assassin in a hundred years. We learned a lot from him."

Natasha paused and studied Steve for a moment choosing her next words carefully. "All of us learned assassination techniques, hand to hand, weaponry, infiltration, spy craft." She looked into Steve's eyes intently. "But he taught me other things, too. Things our masters didn't know about."

It felt like the breath had been punched out of him, another terrifying hope taking its place. "He taught you his magic," Steve whispered in awe.

Natasha nodded slowly a cautious expression on her face. She tapped the door just beneath where Steve's arm still blocked the way. "Maybe we should talk about this inside."

Steve jerked his arm back to his side with a blush and smiled sheepishly. "Yeah, good idea."

The amused quirk to her lips told Steve she wasn't holding his unconscious intimidation attempt against him. She typed in the code and ushered him in locking the door behind them.

They ended up in the living room, Steve taking an arm chair and Natasha curling her feet underneath her in the corner of the couch.

There was a long moment of awkward silence where both of them itched to ask questions but worried they'd inadvertently reveal too many of their best friend and revered teacher's secrets.

Steve, never one to sit and do nothing when rushing in head first was an option spoke first. "Bucky taught you his magic. What exactly did he teach you?"

Natasha ever the cautious one, preferring to hold things close to her chest rather than volunteer information, took a moment to answer. "It was hard," she said, "keeping things from our masters, and Yasha –Barnes-," she corrected, "could only teach me so much with the secrecy."

Nodding in understanding, Steve figured it would be hard, trying to keep magic a secret from ever watching eyes. Especially what he knew of Bucky's magic, what he'd witnessed. It was hands on. Potions and charms and handcrafting magic things.

"I assume he taught you some healing," Steve offered hoping Natasha would respond to the show trust of freely offered knowledge.

She nodded, tucking a bright red lock of hair behind her ear as she remembered the healing magics her teacher had taught her. "Salves for injuries, potions for healing, talismans for protection. And other useful things," had unpleasant implications. Steve didn't ask.

"Why you?" Steve asked instead though not accusatorily. "Why did he teach you?"

The memory came to the front of her mind, cherished and just as vivid as when it happened twenty years ago.

"The day he came to the facility, they had us line up for his inspection," Natasha began, her mind lost in the memories of a ten year old child. "At the time it didn't seem odd, mostly because our only thoughts were dictated by our superiors and didn't have any other reference.

"He went down the line touching each of us on the forehead then on the chest," she tapped the very center of her sternum just above her breasts, "right here, dead center. When he touched me, first my body started to tingle then it felt like I had two hearts beating in my chest."

She paused, an echo of the sensation ghosting through her. "He barely paused. He just looked me directly in the eyes for split second then moved on to the next girl. His gaze was intense though, and he almost seemed intrigued."

"He was testing you," Steve said, a vague memory of Mrs. Barnes doing the exact same thing to almost every kid in the neighborhood at one time or another. "He was looking for magic. Looking to see if you had any."

"Yes," Natasha agreed. "Looking back I don't think his handlers had anticipated him doing that, examining us individually, touching us. They seemed alarmed by it. It was probably the first time in decades he'd acted without explicit orders."

"And he didn't know who he was then?" It was strange, Steve thought, that Bucky couldn't remember his own name, but he remembered the tradition of checking the kids for magic.

"No, they only called him _Soldat_ , or _Aktiv_ -asset. We were just told to call him _Instruktor_ , or _Uchitel'_ -teacher."

"But not you," Steve pointed out. "You called him something else."

"Yasha," Natasha conceded, her voice tinged with nostalgic fondness. "When we were weaving magic, I called him Yasha."

Steve didn't have to ask what the name meant to them. The soft way she said it was answer enough.

"How long did you have together?"

"A little more than two years," she answered a dark look coming over her face. "They took him away just before I turned thirteen."

He almost didn't want to ask, but he had to. "What happened?"

Nat sneered. "One of the directors attempted to use me to bribe a general. Yasha killed them both and twelve other agents before they were able to subdue him." The last memory she had of him, of her beloved Yasha, was the sound of his enraged bellowing echoing off the walls as she was forced to watch them, seven of them, struggling to drag him away.

"I didn't see him again for over a decade."

"When he shot you," Steve concluded.

She pressed a hand over the scar on her hip, a wry look on her face. "When he shot me."

"What did you do?" Because if it had been Steve he would have started searching for Bucky the second the blood stopped flowing from his wound. Which, come to think of it, was more or less exactly what he'd done.

"When I got stateside, after debriefing, when I was put on medical leave, I tried to scry for him." Natasha wrinkled her nose at the memory of the failed attempt. "Nothing. The magic didn't work. Just went around in circles 'til the spell wore off."

Her eyebrows furrowed with a sudden thought. "Now, knowing that they were putting him in cryo, it makes sense the magic couldn't find him."

"Why not?" Steve had never got an in depth understanding of magic. The few times Bucky had tried to explain the inner workings and theories in weaving spells it all went straight over his head.

"I was scrying for Yasha as I knew him, my mentor, alive and a person," Nat tried to explain in terms she thought Steve might understand. "If he was frozen, he would have been as good as dead." Steve shivered unpleasantly. "Even if the spell had been able to find a body with no life in it, I was still searching for the man that was kind to me, that taught me amazing things. That meant the world to me for the short time I knew him."

Heart giving a painful beat, Steve knew exactly how she felt. Even beneath the pained expression on Nat's face, he knew just how heartbreaking it was to love Bucky and lose him. Any incarnation of him.

"In thirteen years there's no telling all that Hydra had done to him. By then, even alive and awake, he wouldn't have been my Yasha anymore."

They sat in solemn quiet. Each allowing themselves to sit with their own sadness, but only for a moment.

Steve sighed heavily, ran a hand through his uncombed hair and inquired, "Have you tried to scry for him since?"

Nat shook her head. "It didn't work. The spell wasn't able to find any part of him before."

"But you were searching for Yasha," Steve reminded. "You said one of the other reasons the spell didn't work could have been because Bucky was frozen. We know he's not with Hydra anymore. He's not in cryo now. What if you scry for him now? Not Yasha, the person, but maybe just his body or soul or something?"

Natasha stared at him for a long stunned moment then she jumped to her feet and raced out of the room.

Steve blinked in surprise. "Uh- Nat? What are you doing?"

There was a series of thumps, the unmistakable sound of miscellaneous items falling out of a closet, and a yelp followed by colorful Russian cursing.

Lips twitching into a slight grin, Steve was glad his rudimentary Russian education had included all the "good words".

"Nat?" he called again.

"I need milk!" came the yell from down the hall in her bedroom. "Get the milk from the fridge!"

Willing to follow directions, Steve did as he was told and made it back to the living room just as Natasha appeared again carting a battered wooden box only a little bigger than a shoebox.

"What's that?" Steve asked as Natasha shoved her collection of coasters and coffee table books to the floor.

"There's a basket on the bottom shelf of the bookcase," she said, ignoring his question as she placed the box on the coffee table. Flipping up the lid on the box and she started rifling thought it. "Find a map of the States and bring it here."

Steve obediently found the map and came back, sitting on the floor next to Nat.

He finally got a look in the box and sucked in a sharp breath. "Is that…?"

"Yep," Nat responded with a pop of her lips and leaned aside enough for Steve to get a better look. "It's my collection of magic."

It was all familiar things to Steve. If he hadn't seen them scattered around Bucky's room, he'd seen them neatly organized around the rest of the Barnes home.

A couple of small mason jars with unknown potions inside, a number of small baggies of herbs and other parts of plants, a small mortar and pestle, a set of knives, a couple colored candles, a wooden spoon. And various other things Steve recognized but didn't know the purpose of.

"You kept it," he murmured wonderingly, carefully picking up a wrinkled waterlogged copy of _Anna Karenina_ , the spine was practically crumbling in on itself. Paging through it, Steve almost immediately noticed the notes (all in Russian) in the margins, underlined words and lines, marked page numbers, and various symbols hidden here and there in seemingly random doodles. "Is this a spell book?" he asked surprised, looking up at Nat.

Natasha glanced at him long enough to snatch the novel from his hands then start flipping through the pages hurriedly. "Yes," she answered distractedly, peering at the text with a frown of concentration between her red brows. "Yasha taught me how to record our magic in code so our masters wouldn't discover them."

People tended to assume that Steve was the smart one of the two of them. Which was bullshit. Bucky was the genius. In school, on the street, making magic, flying through basic training and up the ranks of command. Calling Steve out on the utter stupidity of a large number of his battle plans. It was Bucky that was the brains of the two of them. That he invented his own secret code to hide magic spells in classic Russian literature didn't surprise Steve in the least.

Peering over Nat's shoulder, he tried to decipher something out of the seemingly random annotations on the page. Besides being in Russian, it was encrypted no less than three different ways that he could tell, and apparently, as he watched Nat flip back and forth between three different parts of the book, spread throughout the novel in seemingly no particular order.

"Ah! Here," Nat shoved the book back into Steve's hands and none too gently twisted three of his fingers to mark the pages, "hold that for a moment."

Unfolding the U.S. map, Natasha spread it out on the table and grabbed up the bottle of milk unscrewing the lid. Steve watched as she picked up a slightly bedraggled looking owl's feather and dipped it in the milk. He wrinkled his nose and made a note to throw it out when they were done.

Tugging Steve's hand and the book closer, Nat looked at the first marked page, then the third, and then the second.

"Okay," she took a deep breath in and out, attempting to center herself and still the nervous tremble in her hand. "Here we go."

Lifting the feather out of the milk bottle Natasha held it over the map and they both watched the white liquid drip in the middle of the lower forty-eight.

When she started chanting the spell, a familiar shiver went up Steve's spine.

"Magic searching near and far

Makes no difference where they are

To find my prey as my desire

Shall guide me true."

Her deep voice was a little unsure, less practiced than either Bucky's or Becca's, but Steve felt the magic start to breeze around them and over the map.

The milk pooled like quicksilver on the map and quivered, starting to move. Natasha and Steve held their breath and prayed it worked.

* * *

Bucky was elbow deep in the guts of what looked like an '80s tube tv. He'd been digging through the scrap yard for two hours and he'd stumbled on a few interesting potentially useful things. But not what he was looking for.

He'd decided to start weaving Bruce Banner and the Hulk's spells first. What he was attempting to do for him was nigh on unprecedented. Or at least he hadn't been able to find a comparable occurrence in the magic histories he could get his hands on. Rebecca had never heard of such a thing and a few discreet (and very vague) calls to her children and grandchildren hadn't yielded any different results.

So Bucky was pretty much flying by the seat of his pants. The methods he'd outlined so far were an unlikely mix of his native Romanian practices incorporating some Native American concepts. From the little he'd been exposed to in his youth he understood that the Indians' magic tended to deal more with the soul and the spiritual aspects of a person's being than the body.

Bruce Banner was suffering from a major disconnect with vital parts of his spiritual being. The Hulk was not just a mindless beast. Anyone who observed the footage of him working with the team could see that. He was an integral part of Bruce's soul ripped away and given physical form. Bucky imagined that it was painful for both Bruce and Hulk. Being torn in two and becoming individual sentient beings was unnatural. It went against how humans were made.

And, unfortunately, it was very permanent.

In order to help Bruce and Hulk, Bucky was going to bridge the disconnect and, if not rejoin them, help them resonate in synch. Make it possible for them to have a symbiotic relationship instead of battling and ripping into each other.

Abandoning the tv, Bucky picked his way through a pile of toasters and climbed up a hill of scrap to get to a promising looking fuse box.

He was just prying off the mangled lid when the tingling started. Hands pausing mid motion, Bucky turned his attention to the sensation. From temple to temple across his eyelids and the bridge of his nose his skin began to heat up, the feeling intensified rapidly until it burned.

Someone was trying to find him. And not just searching security footage or following money trails. No, they were forcing an excessive amount of magical power into a scrying spell.

Bucky frowned and examined it closer. The spell was powerful but almost juvenile. Like the caster hadn't mastered the finer, more abstract, personalized aspects of the magic. You don't just insert a name into the incantation, you have to put feelings, impressions, a personal perspective into the magic.

It seems Bucky's pursuer had attempted to do that, but only marginally succeeded.

The magic felt familiar as well, Bucky realized as he continued to study the details of the spell attempting to burn straight into him. Bucky knew this magic almost as well as he knew his sister's.

"Natalia," Bucky whispered. Natalia, his _malen'kiy pauk_ , his fierce little spider.

She was searching for him.

Bucky had never been able to teach her as much as he wanted. Her training had been abruptly cut short and it showed in her casting. Still, Bucky couldn't help feeling proud of his _malen'kiy pauk_. She hadn't forgotten what he'd taught her.

Turning his awareness inward, Bucky overwhelmed Natalia's weaker, half trained magic and reversed the spell's direction. Basically high-jacking her scrying focus, a map or a mirror or maybe a bowl of water, he couldn't tell, Bucky felt his perspective shift and he opened his eyes. As if he was looking upward through his own mirror, he could see exactly who had tried to find him.

Bucky almost lost his guide on the magic when his sight cleared. Staring down at Bucky's commandeered scrying focus was Steve, the big punk.

Steve had that crease between his brows, the one that meant he was thinking of doing something stupid. Nervous, hopeful anticipation was radiating off of him, his usually neat hair was standing on end, and he had deep shadows under his eyes. Bucky's heart clenched.

Sitting next to Steve was Natalia, beautiful and grown up and not trying to strangle him with her thighs. _And where did she even learn that? He sure as shit didn't teach it to her._ She was scowling determinedly down at the instrument of their spell with a coiled kind of controlled anticipation, her whole body held still. A direct contrast to Steve's anxious fidgeting.

He experienced a sense of dissonance that had nothing to do with his unnatural visual perspective.

The two parts of his life had collided breaking through his subconscious compartmentalization. It made him feel unbalanced. Natalia was the one bright spot too soon taken from him in the decades of the numb hell he'd endured. Steve was his brother through childhood and war. He knew, in his head, that Steve and Natalia were on the same team, had fought aliens together, partnered on missions, were even friends.

Something about seeing them staring down at but unable to see him, together and obviously now coconspirators in the secret of his magic, seemed almost impossible. Two people, both immeasurably important in two utterly incomparable times in his life. Somehow the concept of Steve and Natalia discovering each other's knowledge of his magic hadn't occurred to him.

And now that evidence was right in his sight, two people on the very tiny list of those he loved in the world united together in shared secrets and their determined search for him. His heart was beating hard in his chest and his unanchored spell was getting harder to hold. He knew what his next steps had to be.

Looking again at the vision of Steve and Natalia waiting anxiously for the answers to their quest, Bucky felt his near overwhelming love for both of them and smiled.

It was time for him to start coming in from the cold. But nobody said he couldn't have a little fun while doing it.

"Tsk, tsk, Natalia," Bucky murmured to himself, a mischievous grin taking over his lips. "You should know better than to try that with me."

He gathered the magic of the scrying spell, lit a match to it, and watched it burst into flame. The split second sight of Natalia and Steve silently yelping and scrambling back was so worth the backlash headache.

* * *

END…


End file.
